much to learn here from the region and its people, which can inform the scholarly water literature and water policy in the West alike. The lengthiness of the adjudication process may actually have some benefits. There is still time to reform or adapt adjudication, and lessons from New Mexico extend beyond the state line. Few western states have completed their water adjudication processes, and all are seeking solutions to water scarcity and allocation challenges.18
I have divided Unsettled Waters into thematic sections. Part 1 focuses on the work of adjudication and case studies. Chapter 1 describes the roots and purposes of adjudication and how adjudication is linked to prior appropriation, as well as how both complicate cultural understandings of water in New Mexico. The two regional cases in chapters 2 and 3 exemplify how adjudications founder in basins with multiple cultures of water. Chapter 4 then details the problematic social, political, and hydrological consequences when adjudications leave the courts to become negotiated water settlements.
Part 2 examines what adjudications and settlements produce. Chapter 5 examines how adjudication has produced new metrics of space, time, and volumes of water. The adjudication-industrial complex has also produced new forms of expertise, as I argue in chapter 6. In chapter 7, I describe how new water-user organizations and regional water-planning strategies have emerged as by-products of adjudication.
Part 3 focuses on the future of adjudication and coping with new water demands and potential lessons. Chapter 8 discusses what threatens to be the hardest work of all: adjudicating heavily populated regions along the Rio Grande. Chapter 9 addresses climate change, the water demands of other species, and how to account for water in our new era. Finally, in chapter 10, I revisit the experiences of New Mexicans and how they may inform other western states struggling to count and allocate their waters.19
PART ONE
Unsettled Waters
How Water Adjudication Works, What It Does, and What Happens When It Fails
1
How Local Waters Become State Water
Miguel never understood the logic in water adjudication. In his late fifties and a retired employee of the Los Alamos National Laboratories, he was now a constant gardener. Most of his concerns were for the younger generation along his ditch and those few people under the age of thirty still living nearby. Sitting on a lawn chair in the shade of his backyard apple tree, he reflected on adjudication’s implications for him and his neighbors.
I mean, I get that we have to know how much water we have, right? That makes sense, so that Texas doesn’t get it all (he smiles a bit). But beyond that, what do we get out of this whole thing? They haven’t even done my valley, and now they’re warning us that the adjudication is coming to us soon, and we’re not ready. We haven’t organized yet like the Taos folks. My neighbors don’t seem to be worried or alarmed, but they will be once it’s here. Once the state engineers show up, it’s all over, and it’ll be too late for them to make any claims about having irrigated this or that patch, and then that water number gets fixed, and it’s done. There won’t be any future ability to expand water needs, I think. That’s what no one here tends to get—once the process is over, you don’t get another chance, and the amount of water we are using at the time of the process means that is the water we get, assuming no one sells their water or goes out of business … Then the engineer can figure out if there is any water we aren’t using and then have that available for sale if there’s some left over. It [adjudication] will change everything, even if people want to pretend that it won’t change anything.1
ACEQUIAS AND THE HISTORICAL ROOTS OF LOCAL SOVEREIGNTY
Like most of his neighbors in Rio Lucio, a small hamlet outside Picuris Pueblo, Miguel’s home sits along an acequia, which provides the water for his small agricultural plot. It is a shared ditch with the nearby Indian Pueblo as it crosses through both indigenous fields and lands occupied by Hispanos like Miguel.2 Acequias are gravity-fed irrigation ditches and institutions that were brought from the Iberian Peninsula when Spain was ruled by Moors. Acequia as a word has Arabic origins, meaning water carrier in its original form.3 These institutions moved with the Spanish to Mexico and eventually to New Mexico during the Spanish Colonial period (1598–1821).
Notably, New Mexico underwent two major episodes of settler colonialism and three political shifts, starting with the Spanish and shifting to brief Mexican rule (1821–1846) and finally ending with US governance beginning in 1848. This resulted in complex political, legal, and cultural overlays and understandings of natural resources, including water and its governance.4 Well into the twentieth century, acequias were the scale of daily water use, water governance, and life in New Mexico. Hundreds of these ditches exist across the state and are especially common in northern New Mexico, where there is greater water availability (see map 2).
MAP 2. Distribution of acequias in New Mexico. Adapted from Utton Center (2013).
Acequias as institutions function with the aid of a water boss (mayordomo), three commissioners, and the individual members of the ditch who use and maintain the ditch (known as parciantes). These institutions were vital to agrarian life and livelihoods in New Mexico’s semiarid valleys. Today, the dependency on agriculture has decreased, but hundreds of acequias still remain functional. They are microdemocracies unto themselves, functional governing units of the state. They survive because they work.
Acequia members like Miguel and Hector (whom we met in the introduction) understand that water is work. It is work to be shared, via direct labor and through annual financial dues, before the water can be allocated. Members contribute to the annual spring cleaning of the ditch, known as la saca or la limpia, and to its upkeep. On most ditches, mayordomos coordinate with commissioners and other ditch officials on the same stream to estimate when all members on the stream system can begin irrigating and how much water might be available that year based on snowpack. Estimates are adjusted weekly and sometimes daily as fresh rain and snow events occur. This is a highly adaptable and responsive system that works with the actual amount of flowing surface water available rather than stored waters behind a massive dam.
In good years, parciantes can access the water when they need it for crops, gardens, and livestock. When drought or scarcity strikes, the hard part of a mayordomo’s job begins: allocating water by shorter time rotations and watching individual water use to ensure all members’ needs are met. The mayordomo designates when and how much parciantes can irrigate and monitors the water flow. Access to the ditch can be blocked if parciantes fail to pay their dues or take water out of turn. This is an important point: The institution of the acequia—run by the commissioners and mayordomos—controls access to and use of the ditches that carry the water to which individuals have rights. In other words, acequia rights are not the same as individual water rights. Parciantes have to follow the rules of the acequia institution to keep their access to ditch water and maintain their individual water rights.
Acequias as physical features extend the riparian habitat, stitching together patches of emerald floodplain that weave through dry hills dotted with piñons, junipers, and cacti. Ditches can be on one or both sides of a diverted stream (see figure 1). They serve
